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Saturday, April 23, 2016

You ate something unsavory and you need to vomit? Well, there is no need to stick a finger down your throat. Instead, you can read Nicholas Kristof's latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Is Hillary Clinton Dishonest?" in order to achieve the same emetic effect. In his opinion piece, Kristof informs us (my emphasis in red):

"One basic test of a politician’s honesty is whether that person tells the truth when on the campaign trail, and by that standard Clinton does well. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 50 percent are either true or mostly true.

That compares to 49 percent for Bernie Sanders’s, 9 percent for Trump’s, 22 percent for Ted Cruz’s and 52 percent for John Kasich’s. Here we have a rare metric of integrity among candidates, and it suggests that contrary to popular impressions, Clinton is relatively honest — by politician standards."

"Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the [House Judiciary Committee which was investigating Watergate]. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

'Because she was a liar,' Zeifman said in an interview last week. 'She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.'"

A liar who "conspired to violate the Constitution"? That sounds kind of serious.

Kristof goes on to say:

"As for the fundamental question of whether Clinton risked American national security with her email server, I suspect the problem has been exaggerated. As President Obama put it, 'she has not jeopardized America’s national security.'"

"'I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized America’s national security,' Obama said recently on Fox News Sunday. However, Obama added, 'what I’ve also said is that — and she has acknowledged — that there’s a carelessness, in terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes.' This leaves one to wonder whether 'carelessness' will become a new defense to be invoked when an elected official, intelligence-community member, government bureaucrat, contractor, or someone in the military is accused of mishandling classified information.

Obama neglected to add that Clinton’s 'carelessness' included 22 e-mails with the highest level of classification found on her private server. Worse, as the New York Post reported, these e-mails 'revealed names of CIA officers serving overseas and foreigners who are on the spy agency’s payroll – potentially endangering their lives.' Moreover, and with lasting consequences, President Obama in defending Clinton has set the bar very high for determining whether classified information 'jeopardizes America’s national security.'"